LabelKing
Stylish Dinosaur
- Joined
- May 24, 2002
- Messages
- 25,421
- Reaction score
- 268
This surely is a profile, not of courage but of style. The Germans presumably called this Schongeisterei, which as English would have it, no appropriate translation exists. Count Harry Graf Kessler was a German aristocrat whose mother was the mistress of Kaiser Wilhelm I. However, he would call the Kaiser and his family a tacky, impotently bellicose bunch who traded in tawdriness, and ugliness that aspired to the middle-class. He also visits the ruined Imperial Palace, and cooly comments on the "rubbishy" geegaws on the smashed parquet, citing bad aesthetics as tantamount to bad ethics.
He was a Communist, called The Red Count, and apparently homosexual, although of the fastidious variety; that is, inoperative. As per his attendance at Jean Cocteau's premiere of OrphÃ
e: "The part [of the angel] is played by a revoltingly mawkish, effeminate young man who appears to have escaped from some dreadful hairdresser's. This sugary youth completely spoiled my taste for [the production]." I'd suggest the facsimile of his diaries to anyone interested in the intellectual inter-war years, and political discussions as the Count was also an important figurehead in the Weimar Republic. Interesting link on his style: http://www.henry-van-de-velde.com/13